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JENNI FAGAN HAS BEEN NAMED AS ONE OF GRANTA MAGAZINE'S BEST OF YOUNG BRITISH NOVELISTS 2013 SHORTLISTED FOR THE JAMES TAIT BLACK PRIZE FOR FICTION AND THE DESMOND ELLIOTT PRIZE 2013 'One of the most cunning and spirited novels I've read for years' Ali Smith 'An utterly magnificent achievement' Irvine Welsh Fifteen-year old Anais Hendricks is smart, funny and fierce, but she is also a child who has been let down, or worse, by just about every adult she has ever met. Sitting in the back of a police car, she finds herself headed for the Panopticon, a home for chronic young offenders where the social workers are as suspicious as its residents. But Anais can't remember the events that have led her there, or why she has blood on her school uniform...
ONE OF GRANTA MAGAZINE'S BEST OF YOUNG BRITISH NOVELISTS SHORTLISTED FOR THE JAMES TAIT BLACK PRIZE FOR FICTION, THE DESMOND ELLIOTT PRIZE FOR THE PANOPTICON and THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2021 'One of the most stunning literary experiences I've had in years' Irvine Welsh 'Dazzlingly ambitious' Douglas Stuart, author of Shuggie Bain 'A gloriously transgressive novel' Ian Rankin 1910, Edinburgh. Jessie, the devil's daughter, arrives on the doorstep of an imposing tenement building and knocks on a freshly painted wooden door. She has been sent by her father to bear a child for a wealthy couple, but, when things go wrong, she places a curse on the building and all who live there - and it lasts a century. Caught in the crossfire are the residents of 10 Luckenbooth Close, and they all have their own stories to tell. While the world outside is changing, inside, the curse creeps up all nine floors and through each door. Soon, the building's longest kept secret - the truth of what happened to Jessie - will finally be heard.
It's November 2020 and the world is freezing over. As ice water melts into the Atlantic, and vast swathes of people make for the warmer south, Dylan is heading to Scotland, once the home of his late mother and grandmother. Twelve-year-old Stella and her survivalist mother, Constance, scrape by in the snowy Highlands, preparing for a record-breaking winter. Living out of a caravan, they spend their days digging through landfills, searching for anything of value. When Dylan arrives in the middle of the night, their lives change course. Though the weather worsens, his presence brings a new light to daily life, and when the ultimate disaster finally strikes, they'll all be ready.
A powerfully poignant tale of one of the most turbulent moments in Scotland's history: the North Berwick Witch Trials. IT'S THE 4TH OF DECEMBER 1591. On this, the last night of her life, in a prison cell several floors below Edinburgh's High Street, convicted witch Geillis Duncan receives a mysterious visitor – Iris, who says she comes from a future where women are still persecuted for who they are and what they believe. As the hours pass and dawn approaches, Geillis recounts the circumstances of her arrest, brutal torture, confession and trial, while Iris offers support, solace – and the tantalising prospect of escape. Hex is a visceral depiction of what happens when a society is consum...
The Dead Queen of Bohemia is a journey through a life lived on the edge. With a poetic style influenced by Gertrude Stein and William Burroughs, this collection is woven with surrealistic imagery that is both unflinching and dislocating. Fagan's poetry is raw and tough yet beautiful and tender and with themes of loss and recovery, hope and defiance, represents a clarion call from a self-taught poet who started writing at the age of seven and so far has not stopped. The Dead Queen of Bohemia documents the progression of a voice and a life written over the last twenty years. It opens with Jenni's most recent work and includes her previous two collections, both now out of print.
This new book, The Witch in the Word Machine, is a collection that underpins Jenni Fagan's entire approach to words. Her spell poems are portraits of people, lovers and cities: Paris, New York, Edinburgh, Detroit, LA, and San Francisco. The excerpts of her Truth poem are a political response to great uncertainty in the world right now. This collection is an exploration of words as spells, incantations, curse and solace.
These poems are alive with electricity, pulsating with a frequency that vibrates throughout. In a journey from there to here, The Bone Library examines and interprets all of human life. Throughout the collection Jenni Fagan responds to broader themes of identity, of place, of love and the unloved. Written in the old Dick Vet Bone Library during the author's time as writer-in-residence there, this is a vivid exploration that is honest and searching and cuts to the very core of what it is to be alive.
'Beautiful, deep, transfixing . . . it will burn a home in your heart' LEMN SISSAY 'Essential reading, life-changing' SAMANTHA MORTON 'An astonishing piece of work' NIALL GRIFFITHS The government told a story about me before I was born. Jenni Fagan was property of the state before birth. She drew her first breath in care and by the age of seven, she had lived in fourteen different homes and had her name changed multiple times. Twenty years after her first attempt to write this powerful memoir, Jenni is finally ready to share her account. Ootlin is a journey through the broken UK care system - it is one of displacement and exclusion, but also of the power of storytelling. It is about the very human act of making meaning from adversity.
The Working Class and Twenty-First-Century British Fiction looks at how the twenty-first-century British novel has explored contemporary working-class life. Studying the works of David Peace, Gordon Burn, Anthony Cartwright, Ross Raisin, Jenni Fagan, and Sunjeev Sahota, the book shows how they have mapped the shift from deindustrialisation through to stigmatization of individuals and communities who have experienced profound levels of destabilization and unemployment. O'Brien argues that these novels offer ways of understanding fundamental aspects of contemporary capitalism for the working class in modern Britain, including, class struggle, inequality, trauma, social abjection, racism, and stigmatization, exclusively looking at British working-class literature of the twenty-first century.
There is in the short story, at its most characteristic, something we do not often find in the novel, Frank O’Connor wrote, ‘an intense awareness of human loneliness.’ The stories shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award with BookTrust 2017 all feature characters that are disconnected, willingly or unwillingly, from those around them: a mysterious out-of-towner is shunned by her new colleagues; a grieving husband retreats into his old compulsion for hoarding; a promising academic risks his career for a casual liaison with a younger man. And whether we follow the characters’ need to be alone – like the fisherman drifting dangerously far from shore – or trace it back to i...